PREVIEW EXCERPTS from FOUR CORNERS USA: WONDERS OF THE AMERICAN SOUTHWEST

“Destined to become a classic.” — 

$16.95

TURNER / LINDAHL

FO UR CORNERS USA

WAY OUT ON THE COLORA DO PLATEAU, TWO LINES CRISSCROSS WHERE THE BORDERS OF FOUR STATES MEET.

If you stand on this spot, you’ll be in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah all at the same time. And within 150 miles of that point, in every direction, you’ll find a rugged land of astonishing beauty, fantastic rock formations, ancient cities, and diverse cultures.

New York Times best-selling author Anne Hillerman calls this “a beautiful and important book, packed to the brim with historical insights, useful tidbits for travelers, and, best of all, a profound appreciation for this unique part of America’s West. The stunning photographs dramatically reflect the majesty and mystery of this unusual landscape and the resilient people who call it home.

This is a volume to savor from your armchair or to inspire a trip to see these places firsthand.”

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RIO NUEVO

Tucson, Arizona www.rionuevo.com

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“Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky.”

—willa cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop, 1927

IN THE MI DDLE OF NOWHERE ON the red sandstone Colorado Plateau, two straight lines cross at right angles and form a “quadripoint.” Coined by the Office of the Geographer of the United States in 1964, a quadripoint exists when the borders of four distinct territories come together. There is only one place in the United States where four states intersect: Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico. For more than a century and a half, the area of roughly 150 miles in each direction has been known as “Four Corners,” most of which lies on a geographical feature known as the Colorado Plateau. To Southwesterners, “Four Corners,” means not only the vast expanse of magnificent rock formations, vistas, and skies, but also a wide variety of people who live there, along with their histories, customs, and cultures.

Some people see the area as forbidding and desolate at first, but once they get used to the differences, many learn to appreciate the panoramic landscapes and giant rock sculptures. While outsiders may think of it as a desert void, Navajos say there are no trees to block the beautiful view. The Four Corners is also home to one of America’s most brilliantly colored landscapes.

This book is not laid out in straight lines and right angles. Like many galaxies and prehistoric symbols, it curves around itself in a spiral. Starting at the quadripoint, our path first takes us to the southwest, then north, east, south, west, and finally north again in a clockwise pattern.

The slot canyons near Page, Arizona, are a phenomenal example of nature’s wondrous sandstone sculptures.

A QUICK WORD ON TRAVEL ETIQUETTE As you will see in this book, the Four Corners region is far different than anywhere else on Earth. And its people are distinct as well. They have unique customs, traditions, and patterns of acceptable social interaction—in other words, what is polite and proper etiquette.

In her book, Native Roads: A Complete Motoring Guide to the Navajo and Hopi Nations, Fran Kosik wrote a simple and insightful section titled “Travel Etiquette.”

OPPOSITE: Monument Valley is the heart and spirit of the Colorado Plateau’s far-reaching landscapes and barren beauty.

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She says that among the Navajo, Hopi, and Paiute people, only medicine men are allowed to climb mountains because they are considered sacred places. Natives of Four Corners appreciate your respect for this, and they hope you will adapt their attitude of harmony and respect for nature as well. Visitors are also forbidden by the American Antiquities Act to remove prehistoric artifacts from federal lands, which includes Indian reservations.

Native peoples prefer that you ask their permission before including them in your photographs. While some do not want their pictures taken, others, especially in Canyon de Chelly and Monument Valley, generally receive a gratuity for acting as models. The Hopis prohibit all photography on their reservation, so it is best to leave your camera in the car.

On their website, www.experiencehopi.com/faq, the Moenkopi Legacy Inn has posted these rules about visiting the Hopi Villages:

» It is polite to accept invitations to eat, even if you eat or drink only a little.

» Alcohol is not allowed on Hopi or Navajo Tribal lands.

Tribal law prohibits consumption.

» Pets are not allowed when touring Hopi land. » Removal of pottery shards or rocks is prohibited. » Sacred kivas (underground ceremonial chambers) and graveyards are off-limits.

» Please enter a home by invitation only. » Public restrooms are not available. » Dances are religious ceremonies; please refrain from clapping or taking pictures.

Appropriate dress is another sign of respect when visiting the Four Corners, especially when attending dances and other ceremonies. These are religious ceremonies and you should dress as you would when attending a wedding or baptism.

Wear long pants or modest skirts instead of shorts, and definitely no tank tops, halter tops, or other immodest attire.

Part of the unique experience of visiting the Four Corners is in getting to know people who live and think differently and learning from these cultural encounters. This happens more fully when everyone is treated with friendship and mutual respect that results in rewarding new relationships.

1. Where Four States Meet THE COLORADO PLATEAU “You have to get over the color green; you have to quit associating beauty with gardens and lawns; you have to get used to an inhuman scale; you have to understand geological time.”

—wallace stegner, Where the bluebird sings to the lemonade springs: Living and writing in the West, 1955 The Colorado Plateau spans more than 150,000 square miles (390,000 sq km) from central Utah’s Wasatch Mountain Range, north to the Uinta Range near Salt Lake City, to Colorado’s Rocky Mountains in the east, and the Mogollon (moh-goYONE) Rim in central Arizona to the south. The plateau’s southern boundary has one of the most mispronounced names

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Just south of the Utah-Arizona border, West Mitten and East Mitten loom over Monument Valley.

OPPOSITE: The Second Wave is similar to the nearby often-photographed “The Wave” in the Coyote Buttes section of the Paria Canyon-Vermilion Cliffs Wilderness Area.

in the region and is still called “Muggy-on” by many locals.

The Colorado Plateau has an average elevation of 5,000 feet and is a semiarid high desert interspersed with high mesas, pinnacles, canyons, and rounded mountain ranges formed by molten rock. The winters are cold, summers are hot, and water is scarce.

One of the most interesting features of the Colorado Plateau is its remarkable geological stability. It has remained a thick block of the Earth’s crust for more than 600 million years without the usual folding and faulting that has affected most other areas. For two billion years, while the Rocky Mountains and the Basin and Range regions were forming all around it, the fourmile-thick plateau eroded into a relatively smooth plane.

Beginning about four and a half million years ago (mya), the Earth’s tectonic plates began to collide here, creating mountain ranges and canyons. At the same time, sediments sank to the bottom of prehistoric oceans, which dried out, the sediments hardened, and then the oceans came back, repeating the process for millions of years.

During the Paleozoic era, 542–251 mya, the supercontinent Pannotia broke up and Pangea formed as tropical seas periodically inundated the Colorado Plateau region. Thick layers of limestone, sandstone, siltstone, and shale were laid down in the shallow marine waters. When seas retreated, streams eroded older layers of sediment and deposited sands that piled into dunes. More than 300 million years passed as layer upon layer of sediment accumulated. What would eventually become today’s Colorado Plateau broke away from the supercontinent Pangea 251 mya at the beginning of the Mesozoic era. The Me-

sozoic is divided into three periods: the Triassic (250–200 mya), the Jurassic (200–145 mya), and the Cretaceous (145–65 mya).

In the Early Triassic, the climate got warmer with less seasonal variation. Amphibians up to six feet in length left fossil footprints on stream bottoms in the Moenkopi Formation around Glen Canyon. Layers of sediment accumulated in short-lived lakes, ponds, streams, and inland seas and created the Chinle, Kayenta, and Moenave rock formations. After many centuries, the climate became subtropical, warm and humid.

Jungle-like forests of palms and ferns grew abundantly along the banks of a vast muddy river that would later form a layer of shale.

Then in the Late Triassic, gigantic conifer trees as high as 250 feet fell and turned to stone in Arizona’s Petrified Forest and the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. Dinosaurs and early mammals appeared and evolved as the climate changed again in the Jurassic period. As the area heated and dried, dinosaur tracks were preserved in ancient dunes.

In another 100 million years, during the Late Cretaceous period, the climate changed again, with swamps forming along the coasts of another inland sea, forming sandstone, shale, and some coal deposits. The Cretaceous Seaway separated the western United States from the Great Plains. In this period, marine animals existed as indicated by their fossils in the Glen Canyon area, including oysters, mollusks, plesiosaurs, sharks, and skate.

Then around 66 mya, at the end of the Cretaceous, about half of the vertebrates were killed off because of an asteroid six miles in diameter that crashed into what is now Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula.

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INDIAN TRIBES OF THE FOUR CORNERS NAVAJO These Athapaskan speakers came from the Great Plains where they were hunter-gatherers, excellent horsemen, and raiders.

They arrived in the Four Corners area sometime after 800 CE and settled next to the Pueblo people and learned to farm and make pottery from them. The Navajo people are a matrilineal society. At the center of Navajo culture is the concept of Hozho, the universal interconnection between beauty, harmony, and goodness in all things, both physical and spiritual.

Respect for Hozho, including respect for their elders, results in health and well being for all living things and inanimate objects like rocks and stars as well.

The Navajo Nation is the largest Indian reservation in the United States, encompassing an area roughly 200 miles wide by 140 miles long in northeastern Arizona, southeastern Arizona, and northwestern New Mexico. With a population of 356,890 members recorded by the 2016 U.S. Census, the Navajo are also the second largest tribe in the United States, next to the Cherokee. Navajo people are renowned for their silver and turquoise jewelry, rug weaving, healing sandpaintings, and sheep raising.

HOPI These descendants of the Ancestral Puebloans, in what is now Arizona, speak a form of Uto-Aztecan and are experts at farming with very little water. Their spiritual beliefs are elaborate and complex with many gods and spirits including katsinam, represented in the dances and also in dolls carved from cottonwood tree roots. Several Hopi communities have maintained their ancestral culture and many Hopi are also known to be excellent runners.

UTE The Ute are descended from hunter-gatherers who spoke the Numic language branch of Uto-Aztecan and migrated east from southern California to what is now Utah and Colorado around 1000 CE. The Ute call themselves Nuutsiu, “the people.” Although it is still unclear, the name Ute may come from an Apache word for “people of the mountains” or “people of the north.” The state of Utah gets its name from this tribe.

Their language is similar to that of the Paiute, which indicates that they may have diverged hundreds, rather than thousands of years ago.

SOUTHERN PAIUTE Turquoise jewelry, as worn by premier rug weaver Lucy Fatt, is a source of pride and tradition among the Navajo. TOP RIGHT: While traditional Hopi dances were only performed on their mesas, tribal groups outfitted in new regalia now perform in Flagstaff, Sedona, Mesa Verde National Park, and the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington D.C.

The Southern Paiutes are a subgroup of the Paiutes that established their homelands along the Colorado River in southern Nevada, southern Utah, and northern Arizona.

They became more adapted to the desert environment while their relatives the Utes expanded their seasonal hunting trips into the Rocky Mountains where they adopted some cul-

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tural traits from the Plains Indians. The Southern Paiute are known for their traditional beadwork.

PUEBLO These descendants of the Ancestral Puebloans live in villages called pueblos, the Spanish word for town or village. Like the Hopi, the Pueblo live in multistoried apartment-style homes modeled after their ancestors’ great houses and cliff dwellings. The Pueblo people are divided into several distinct cultural groups, some of whom speak variations of a language called Keres or Keresan, while others speak Kiowa-Tanoan, a language related to Uto-Aztecan. The Pueblo are traditionally farmers but are also ranchers and known for their beautiful pottery. The general term Pueblo Indian refers to several federally recognized separate Indian tribes residing primarily in New Mexico.

LAGUNA

ZUNI

The Laguna people are a federally recognized Pueblo tribe who speak Western Keresan. Research of more than a thousand local archaeological sites indicates that people have been living in that area since 6,500 BCE. After the Pueblo Revolts (1680–1699) the Spanish founded a Catholic mission at the current location in 1699, naming the village Laguna because of a nearby lake created when prehistoric people built a dam there. At one time it was the only lake in what is now New Mexico.

The ancient Zuni village of Hawikuh was the first large Southwestern community to be visited by Europeans. Linguists note that the Zuni language is not related to any other language. Created about six thousand years ago, the Zuni language, or “Zuni Way,” is spoken by only 9,500 people, some in Arizona but mostly around Zuni Pueblo, New Mexico. It is still the Zuni’s primary language and most of their children speak it. The Zuni create beautiful pottery but are primarily known for their intricate petit point, needlepoint, fetish carving, and inlay jewelry traditionally made from coral, jet, mother of pearl, and turquoise stones.

ACOMA The Acoma also speak Western Keresan and share cultural and religious ties with the Laguna people, including the Laguna-Acoma Jr.-Sr. High School located in between the two communities. The Acoma have a long tradition of creating beautiful pottery. While their traditional colors are orange and black on a white background, more recent generations of potters design with bright, vibrant colors. The geometric symbols on their pottery often represent rain, lightning, mountains, and the cycle of life.

ABOVE: Most Laguna pottery features abstract geometric designs but this water jar and other pieces depict more realistic animals and flowers. TOP RIGHT: Acoma pottery is renowned for its thin walls, fluted rims, and geometric designs.

Zuni dancers in traditional regalia performing the olla (water jar) dance.

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Bows and arrows replaced the spear and atlatl during the Basketmaker III Era (500–750 CE). By this time, these people were living in complex pit houses, most of them near hunting grounds and fields.

By 750 CE, the Ancestral Puebloans began to build bigger houses. At first it was just rough lean-tos called jacals, wooden post frames covered with woven roofs and sides plastered with mud. Then stone slabs were propped up around a stone foundation.

Between 900 and 1150 CE, known as the Pueblo II Era, adequate rainfall and relatively warm temperatures allowed communities to reach peak population density and inhabit the settlements for longer spans of time. Pueblo II people developed specialized local architecture and pottery styles and began to domesticate turkeys and build irrigation canals, check dams, and terraces to adapt to seasonal rainfall conditions.

However, after several centuries of growth and improvement, around 1130 CE, several locations in the Western Hemisphere experienced what climatologists call the 300-year Great Drought. This affected their lifestyle dramatically, as will be seen at specific sites.

FOUR CORNERS MONUMENT At first, several tribes, including Ute, Southern Paiute, Pueblo, and Navajo, inhabited the land where the four states now meet.

The concepts of individual land ownership and legal boundaries arrived with the Spaniards in 1598, were perpetuated by the Republic of Mexico when they won their Independence in 1821, and continued via United States laws with the Treaty of

The official marker at the Four Corners Monument quadripoint. TOP: Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, was four to five stories high with more than eight hundred rooms.

Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848.

The first common border line, between New Mexico Territory (which then included what is now Arizona) and Utah Territory, came with the Compromise of 1850. Then in 1861 Congress transferred some of Utah’s land to the newly formed Colorado Territory. The new border between Utah and Colorado was the 32nd meridian west from the Washington (D.C.) Meridian, not the Greenwich Meridian (which became the standard reference point around 1912).

Although there was a brief Confederate Territory of Arizona, the U.S. Army’s First California Volunteers drove the Confederates out of what is now Arizona in June of 1862, and in 1863 Congress made the split between Arizona and New Mexico territories on the north/south 32nd meridian, just like

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Utah and Colorado, thus completing the quadripoint.

In 1875, the first surveying marker was placed showing the division of the territories, and a simple cement slab inscribed with the border intersection was constructed in 1912. A paved road made the monument accessible in 1962, and now each of the four states has its seal on the monument as well as the inscription, “Here Meet, in Freedom, Under God, Four States.”

The monument area was rebuilt in 2009. Four Corners Monument is part of the Navajo Nation Parks and Recreation system and features a year-round visitors and demonstration center where Navajo artisans display their skills.

Several years ago the press made a big deal about how, according to the Global Positioning System (GPS) measurements, the current Four Corners Monument was in the wrong place as far as the official borders of each state are concerned, and that new GPS readings placed the monument 2.5 miles (4 km) off its mark. Officials from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Geographic Survey (NGS) responded with a technical report entitled “Why the Four Corners Monument is in Exactly the Right Place.” The NGS then worked with the media to correct inaccuracies in their earlier stories, clarifying that the distance between the actual location of the monument and its intended location is not 2.5 miles as reported; the quadripoint is only 1,800 feet to the west of the marker. In addition, the NGS stated that a basic rule of boundary surveying is that once a monument has been established and accepted by all parties involved, it is the legal boundary, regardless of inaccurate measurements.

2. The Southwest Quadrant TEEC NOS POS TRADING POST About six miles south and a little west of the Four Corners Monument, you’ll find one of the best traditional trading posts on the Navajo Reservation: Teec Nos Pos (rhymes with “lease toss loss”) is Navajo for “cottonwood trees in a circle.”

A native of Essex County, Virginia, Hambleton Bridger Noel came to Arizona to cure his tuberculosis in 1898. In 1905 he took a wagonload of goods to a favorite Navajo gathering spot and set up the area’s first trading post amid a large stand of cottonwood trees in a canyon near the Carrizo Mountains very close to the quadripoint.

Noel married Eva Foutz in 1911. Her father, Joseph Lehi Foutz, came to Arizona with Mormon pioneer Jacob Hamblin in 1877 and managed or owned several trading posts on the Colorado Plateau. The Foutzes are related to the Tanners, another trading post dynasty. The post is now owned and managed by John McCulloch.

The original trading post burned to the ground in 1959, and the new post was built closer to U.S. Highway 160. “Teece,” as locals call it, is an unassuming building on the outside, and

TRADING POSTS

Wood carvings are one of many craft items available at trading posts for more than a century.

The earliest Navajo trade with non-natives was with Spanish settlers in the 1700s. Formal trading began with the Mormon settlements north and west of the Colorado River in the 1850s, but more Navajos moved to that area in 1862–63 as U.S. military campaigns against the Navajos began in earnest in New Mexico.

Early traders received government licenses and were allowed to build posts on Indian land without paying rent.

The Navajos traded mostly for luxury items (like coffee and canned tomatoes) in those early days and so were not dependent on trade at that point.

When the majority of Navajos were sent to the internment camp at Bosque Redondo, many acquired a taste for Anglo goods, especially coffee, flour, salt, sugar, and canned goods, especially tomatoes. They learned the convenience of pots and pans, tools, bridles, and saddles. When the Navajos returned to Arizona after the Treaty of 1868, they were served by traveling traders who sold their goods out of wagons. By 1870, the market for Anglo goods was big enough that permanent trading posts opened to serve increased demands.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the number of trading posts increased in the Southwest. They were always owned and operated by non-Indians but often employed Indian managers. The trading post owners greatly increased Native arts and crafts production and its effect on the Native American economy. They supplied much-needed dry goods and food staples and provided Indians a market for their baskets, jewelry, rugs, sheep, and wool. When the railroad arrived in the Four Corners and made tourism travel easier, competition among post owners increased. Trading post owners and managers began to ask for products that were more likely to sell. Blankets gave way to rugs, smaller bracelets outsold big necklaces, and pottery creamers and salt and pepper shakers replaced pots as big-selling products.

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A rainbow lands on Walpi, First Mesa. Long vistas provide excellent views around the Hopi country.

OPPOSITE LEFT: Located twenty miles southeast of Tuba City, Coal Mine Canyon is a series of ravines filled with multicolored spires, cliffs, and weather-sculpted sandstone formations.

mesas are noted for crafting katsina dolls, fine traditional woven clothing, coiled baskets, paintings, drawings, and turquoise and silver overlay jewelry, but most Hopi pottery is created on First Mesa.

There were more than 7,500 Hopis in the United States in 2015, according to the U.S. Census. Their language is one of thirty Uto-Aztecan language subgroups spoken from Idaho to El Salvador. The Hopi people call their ancestors Hisatsinam, known to anthropologists as Ancestral Puebloans. The name Hopi has been shortened from Hopituh Shi-nu-mu, and can be translated as “The Peaceful People.” In a deeper sense, it means “one who is mannered, civilized, peaceable, polite, and adhering to the Hopi Way,” according to the Hopi Dictionary.

The Hopi Way is to strive toward reverence and respect for all things. Hopis believe that their ceremonies benefit the whole world. They believe the land is sacred, and agriculture is an important part of their livelihood and culture. They are highly skilled micro or subsistence farmers, able to sustain crops on very little water.

At the center of the Hopi Way is the katsina (formerly known as kachina). To the Hopi, Zuni, Tewa, Acoma Pueblo, and Laguna Pueblo people, katsinam (plural) are benevolent spirit beings or personifications of antelope, corn, insects, snow, sun, thunderstorms, wind, and many other concepts in the real world and central to their spiritual life. There are more

than four hundred types of katsinam in the Hopi and Pueblo pantheon, and katsinam exist in three aspects. They can be spiritual beings, or masked dancers in religious ceremonies, or, as they are most well known, carved wooden dolls given to children to teach them about the various spirits they represent and how the universe works. Katsinam have the power to help humans by healing, bringing rain, or protecting them from adversity. They show that life resides in all things in the universe, and that humans must be in harmony with them all.

The Hopis believe that the katsinam live on the San Francisco Peaks near Flagstaff.

The Hopi Reservation encompasses 2,532 square miles (8,557 sq km) but the land has been disputed with the surrounding Navajo Nation for many decades. The U.S. Congress passed acts in 1974 and 1996 to apportion lands on which both tribes lived. However, not all the families living in the other tribe’s area have moved, and as of this writing land ownership is still in controversy.

TUBA CITY: WHEN IS A CITY NOT A CITY? According to most geographers, settlements of 100,000 to 3,000,000 people are considered cities, large cities, or metropolises. But Tuba City, population 8,611 in the 2010 United States Census, has never seemed to care for the rules. Slightly larger than Shiprock, New Mexico, it is the Navajo Nation’s largest community.

Hopi farmers from Oraibi built the village of Moenkopi a few miles southeast of Tuba City around 1870 and grew large cotton crops in the Moenkopi Wash’s rich soil. Mormon pioneer Jacob Hamblin blazed trails in Utah and northern

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LOUIS TEWANIMA , HOPI RUNNER

Bain News Service/Library of Congress

Arizona as early as 1858 and met Hopi headman Tuuvi twenty years later. Tuuvi converted to Mormonism and the Mormons named their settlement after the Hopi leader (whose name they evidently mispronounced and misspelled) and optimistically added “City.”

The Navajo name for Tuba City is Tó Naneesdizí, “tangled waters,” for the many underground springs that form reservoirs there. The water attracted Hopis and Paiutes to settle there, but most of the current residents are Navajo.

Located in the center of town on Main Street, the Tuba City Trading Post was established in 1870, and in 1905 Flagstaff ’s pioneering Babbitt brothers took ownership and designed the two-story cut-stone building with eight sides just like a Navajo hogan. The restored trading post, now owned and operated

by Navajo Nation Hospitality Enterprise, is well stocked with a wide variety of Native American arts and crafts as well as Southwestern clothing.

There are two museums just a few steps from the trading post. The Explore Navajo Interactive Museum, whose ultramodern geodesic dome design also replicates the hogan shape, was built as an exhibit for the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt

Most Hopi people have chosen to live in their own world, geographically, socially, and spiritually. More than a century ago, however, there was one Hopi man who became internationally famous. That man was Louis Tewanima, silver medalist in the 10,000-meter run in the 1912 Summer Olympics in Stockholm, Sweden.

Born in 1888, Tewanima and his friends liked to run the sixty miles from Second Mesa to Winslow when they were kids. He was sent first to the boarding school at Fort Wingate and then to Carlisle Indian School where his track coach was Glenn “Pop” Warner, a famous American football coach.

Louis Tewanima ran the marathon in the 1908 Olympics in London and the Boston Marathon in 1909. After wins in the 1920s from New Orleans to New York City, sportswriters nicknamed him “the fastest man in the world.” He didn’t appear to be affected by his fame and returned to Second Mesa to grow corn and raise sheep. Tewanima was selected for the all-time U.S. Olympic track and field team in 1954 and inducted into the Arizona Sports Hall of Fame in 1957. He died in 1969 at age eighty-seven when his eyesight failed him while returning home one night after a ceremonial dance and he fell from a seventy-foot cliff.

In 1974 the Hopi people created the Louis Tewanima Footrace in his honor. Held on Sunday during the Labor Day weekend, the 10k and 5k courses start at the top of Second Mesa and follow a foot trail that circles around and down through a riverbed and ends with a climb up a steep stone staircase back to the top of the mesa and the finish line. The race is open to all, and many leading runners attend.

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MONUMENT VALLEY

But now there was a new couple in the area, right in the center of Monument Valley. They were Harry and Leone “My first sight of Monument Valley came with a dazzling Goulding, destined to serve the movie industry for almost flash of lightning. It revealed a vast valley, a strange world four decades. Harry Goulding was a true Westerner, born of colossal shafts and buttes of rock, magnificently sculpin Durango, Colorado in 1897. He came from a family of tured, standing isolated and aloof, dark, weird, lonely.” sheep ranchers, and when Leone Knee first saw Harry at the —zane grey, “Nonnezoshe—The Rainbow Bridge,” American Hotel in Aztec, New Mexico, she said he was a tall The Recreation Magazine, February, 1915 lanky wrangler in boots, Levi’s, and a cowboy hat. They got married in 1923 when she was 18 and he was 26. He had a Today, almost everyone in the world has seen images of the hard time spelling her name when he wrote to her, so he just fantastic sandstone formations at Monument Valley, even called her Mike. though it is not on the way to anywhere and more than a hunThe young couple then set off on an adventure and fortydred miles from interstate freeways. Its remoteness is part of its five-year romance in Monument Valley. The land that stradcharacter and also the reason it didn’t receive any attention undled the Utah/Arizona border had belonged to the Paiute tribe, til the early 1900s when magazine articles and movies shared but the United States government swapped them for more ferMonument Valley with the world. tile land farther north in order to open the area for oil exploAt first only a handful of explorers, adventurers, and tourration. When oil prospects fizzled and the land was open for ists came to the area. But when it became the base for explohomesteading, Harry sold his Colorado ranch and purchased rations to Rainbow Bridge (forty-three miles 640 acres at the base of Big Rock Door Mesa. to the west over rugged terrain) and the public At first the situation was tense with the read and saw pictures of the area, Monument Navajos and Paiutes, but the Native people Valley became a major attraction. soon realized that goods they wanted were In 1910, the Wetherills moved thirty miles now thirty miles closer. Harry Goulding began south from Oljato to Kayenta. It was a day closer buying sheep in Monument Valley a few years to their supply line, and they built a trading post earlier so the Navajos called him Dibé Nééz— there in the spring of 1911. In 1915, Zane Grey “Tall Sheep.” They liked him because he was Petroglyphs at Eye of the Sun wrote a sequel to Riders of the Purple Sage (congenerous, cooperative, and he extended their Arch, Monument Valley. sidered to be the most popular Western novel of store credit in rough times. all time) called The Rainbow Trail, and the main Harry and Mike lived in a 10 × 12-foot characters were based on John and Louisa Wetherill. tent for two years until they could build a stone building for By 1913 there was a new industry and a different group of living quarters and a trading post. Harry began raising sheep, visitors: the moving picture people. Zane Grey demanded that but severe droughts in 1934 and 1936 led him to find another movies based on his novels must be filmed in the actual locaincome source. tions, so the cameras followed him to the Four Corners.

Harry went to Hollywood in the 1930s and came home with In 1925 The Vanishing American became the first movie contracts. Monument Valley would not be the Western icon it filmed in Monument Valley. From then on, the Wetherills were is today if it hadn’t been for Harry Goulding and photographer in the movie business, providing mule teams and lodging for Josef Muench. Muench was born in Schweinfurt, Bavaria, in the moviemakers.

1904 and immigrated to Detroit when he was 24. His first pic-

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ture of Rainbow Bridge appeared in Arizona Highways in 1938, and later Muench said he visited Monument Valley 160 times during his sixty-year career.

Harry Goulding said he learned that United Artists wanted to film a Western on location somewhere in the West. He asked his friend Muench to put together an album of Monument Valley photographs to showcase its beauty and grandeur. Then in 1938 Harry and Mike drove right to United Artists headquarters in Hollywood. The story goes that when Harry couldn’t get past the receptionist, he threatened to bring in his bedroll and camp out in the office. Whether he did or not, a location manager for the upcoming movie Stagecoach saw the pictures and

Nowhere in the world can you see as many fascinating sandstone sculptures as in Monument Valley. TOP: Distance takes on new meaning in Monument Valley.

then director John Ford looked at them. Later, Ford said that it wasn’t the first time he’d heard of Monument Valley.

But the photos and Harry’s enthusiasm must have sold Ford on the location because Harry said he left the office with a check for $5,000. Ford made six more films in Monument Valley over the next twenty-five years and said that Monument Valley was the “most complete, beautiful, and peaceful place on earth.”

Monument Valley is a combination of siltstone, sandstone, and shale sparsely dotted with desert-hardy juniper and yucca

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Not only is Lake Powell a great place for tourists and sportsmen, movie producers love it too. In the 1965 epic, The Greatest Story Ever Told, director George Stevens said that he decided to shoot in the Southwest instead of the Holy Land because “I wanted to get an effect of grandeur.” More than forty movies and television shows have been filmed in and around Lake Powell since then. Looking like something out of this world, the contrast of its blue water with the stark orange-red sandstone shoreline was the perfect choice for Planet of the Apes (1968). Its remote setting with no signs of modern life also made it a good location for Westerns: MacKenna’s Gold (1969), The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), Wanda Nevada (1979), Maverick (1994), and Broken Arrow (1996) were filmed on or around Lake Powell.

And unlike most national parks and recreation areas, this one has a fairly large town almost at the water’s edge. Originally called Government Camp, the town of Page was founded in 1957 as a base of operations for the Glen Canyon Dam and was renamed for former Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner John C. Page. The town incorporated in 1975 and is home to the two largest electric power plants in the western United States, a hydroelectric one at the dam and the coal-powered Navajo Generating Station on the east edge of town. Page’s new roads and bridge make it the gateway to several national parks, monuments, and Colorado River expeditions.

Just seven miles south of Page is another of those natural wonders for which the Four Corners is famous. Horseshoe

Before the completion of Navajo Bridge in 1929, a ferry was the only way to cross the Colorado River between Arizona and Utah.

BELOW: Hundreds of secluded coves make Lake Powell a houseboat haven.

Bend is an incised meander on the Colorado River just as impressive as the Goosenecks on the San Juan River. The overlook at Horseshoe Bend is 1,000 feet (300 m) above the Colorado River. There is a 1.5-mile hiking trail to the edge, and with no guardrails it’s quite a thrill to stand at the overlook and look straight down.

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GLEN CANYON NATIONAL RECREATION AREA Created in 1972 for both preservation and recreation purposes, the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area is surrounded by natural wonders and several of the Southwest’s most fascinating national parks and monuments.

From Lees Ferry on its southern boundary and Vermilion Cliffs National Monument and Grand Canyon National Park farther southwest, to Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument on its west flank, and finally Utah’s Orange Cliffs and Capitol Reef and Canyonlands National Parks on its northern edge, this recreation area is the hub of what’s called the grand circle of Southwestern national parks and monuments.

The Glen Canyon National Recreation Area can be reached from five Lake Powell marinas, and there are houseboat rental facilities, four campgrounds, and two airports inside the perimeter. In addition to hiking trails, there are places set aside for mountain biking, backpacking, and guided tours via boats or four-wheeled vehicles.

MARBLE CANYON Five miles south of Lees Ferry, the Colorado River flows into Marble Canyon under Navajo Bridge. Considered the highest steel arch bridge in America when it was completed in 1929, it had to be christened with ginger ale instead of the traditional champagne because of Prohibition.

Like many place names all over the world, the name of this canyon is misleading. There is no marble in Marble Canyon.

Major John Wesley Powell, a geology professor at Illinois Wesleyan University at the time of the expedition, knew it was not marble. But he said, “The limestone of the canyon is often polished, and it makes a beautiful marble. Sometimes the rocks are of many colors—white, gray, pink, and purple, with saffron tints.”

The Navajo Bridge is one of only seven land crossings for 750 miles along the Colorado River and it rises 467 feet above the river. A new, similar bridge opened in 1995 and the old one remains as a pedestrian bridge, offering excellent sunset views of the Colorado River, the surrounding cliffs, and the rare California condors who like to roost under the bridge.

VERMILION CLIFFS NATIONAL MONUMENT Most of Vermilion Cliffs National Monument is a flat, sandy, isolated plateau. It covers 294,000 acres of remote uninhabited country in the Four Corners. There are a few outcroppings of multicolored swirling sandstone formations, but the monument is named for its main attraction. The Vermilion Cliffs themselves are said to be one of the most spectacular, continuous, expansive cliff faces in the United States. Named for

There is no marble in Marble Canyon, but the weather-polished limestone walls resemble it.

their scarlet red variegated Chinle Formation sandstone, the cliffs are thirty miles long and up to two thousand feet high in some places.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service operates one of its three California Condor Recovery Program breeding and release sites at Vermilion Cliffs. This endangered species is the largest flying land bird in North America. They have a wingspan of 9.5 feet (2.9 m), can weigh up to 25 pounds as adults, and can soar and glide up to 50 miles per hour and travel 100 miles or more per day, which explains why many are seen under the Navajo bridge 30 miles away from their home. By the late 1930s, condors were found only in California, and by 1982, the total population worldwide was just twenty-two birds. The reintroduction of captive-bred condors began in 1992 in California, and they started the second program in Arizona in 1996 with ten condors. By 2005 the total number of condors had increased to 270, and in December 2016, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reported a world total condor population of 446, with 276 of those living in the wild.

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3. The Northwest Quadrant FREMONT CULTURE This prehistoric culture got its name because the first archaeological sites for this culture were discovered along the Fremont River. These hunter-gatherers lived in natural rock shelters and pit houses in Idaho, Nevada, Utah, and Colorado between 600 and 1300 CE. They were loosely organized bands of families and had to be flexible and adaptable to changes in their surroundings.

Fremont people probably never numbered more than 10,000 and lived varied lifestyles. Some were settled farmers, others were nomadic hunter-gatherers, and other groups shifted between these two lifestyles. They hunted and trapped large and small game and fish, using snares, nets, fishhooks, bows and arrows, and atlatls. The Fremont Culture gathered edible nuts, berries, and shrubs and grew corn, beans, and squash along the river bottoms.

Although they differed in many things, Fremont Culture regional subgroups from Elko, Nevada, to Pocatello, Idaho, to Grand Junction, Colorado, and St. George, Utah, all made baskets and moccasins in a particular style, as well as clay figurines and distinctive thin-walled gray pottery. They did not live in cities or build multistoried dwellings like their Ancestral Puebloan neighbors to the south, however.

Fremont rock art depicts deer, lizards, bison, bighorn sheep, abstract designs, and handprints. TOP: This curious formation is in the White Pocket section of Vermilion Cliffs National Monument.

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Larger Fremont settlements dwindled between 1300 and 1500 CE. As with the other peoples, drought sent them away from big villages and back to semi-nomadic foraging. About a thousand years ago, the hunter-gatherer ancestors of the Ute, Paiute, and Shoshone peoples may have migrated into the area.

GRAND STAIRCASE-ESCALANTE NATIONAL MONUMENT Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument is bordered

by Glen Canyon National Recreation Area on the east, Grand Canyon National Park on the south, Bryce Canyon National Park on the west, and Capitol Reef on the northeast, and there are also several state parks, a national forest, and a primitive area in the region. The Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument area was the last place in the United States to be mapped, and not many tourists visit its beautiful rock formations because of its lack of roads. Signing an executive order on December 4, 2017, President Donald Trump reduced this monument by nearly 47 percent.

The area is divided into three geographical sections whose rock formations span more than two hundred million years of Earth’s history from the Permian to Cretaceous eras. The westernmost third, Grand Staircase, got its name because of its series of broad rock benches, terraces, plateaus, and cliffs.

The Cockscomb, a series of hogbacks (long narrow ridges with narrow crests and steep slopes on both sides) separates the Grand Staircase from the Kaiparowits Basin, a series of Cretaceous-era plateaus, buttes, and mesas. On its eastern edge, the Straight Cliffs mark the basin’s eastern boundary with the Escalante Canyons.

This area is named for Spanish explorer and priest, Father Silvestre Veléz de Escalante, assistant to Father Atanasio Domínguez in a 1776–1777 exploration to develop a route from Santa Fe, New Mexico, to Monterey, California. Plagued by dehydration and disease, the group reached the Cedar City,

It’s a long journey by dirt road and then hiking to reach Golden Cathedral in Neon Canyon, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, but well worth the effort. LEFT: On Yellow Rock, in Grand Staircase, rock formations resemble thousands of stone steps rising hundreds of feet.

Utah, area on October 11, 1776, and turned back. Their return route went through what is now called Escalante Canyons.

Here, the Escalante River scoured out a maze of towering walls and left stunning grottoes in hidden canyon bottoms.

More late-Cretaceous terrestrial fossils have been found in Grand Staircase-Escalante Monument than anywhere else in the United States. Twenty new dinosaur species have been discovered since 2000, capturing the remains of an ancient tropical rainforest and providing a 30-million-year record of prehistoric species from mosses and ferns to giant dinosaurs.

Inhabited by humans since the Clovis Culture moved in 13,000 years ago, both Ancestral Pueblo and Fremont Culture people lived in this area from 950 to 1100 CE. Around 1100 CE they formed a blend of Ancestral Pueblo and Fremont cultures. In the mid-1200s, the farmers moved south and the Southern Paiute hunter-gatherers moved in, although there was also cultural blending and intermarriage. Euro-American pioneers began farming and ranching in the monument in the 1850s but many communities were abandoned because of the harsh climate.

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block during the cattle boom of 1886–1905. They could never tame the San Juan River, however, and many pioneer families left Bluff for Grayson, a town twenty-three miles north on U.S. Highway 191. But you can’t go to Grayson anymore; it is now known as Blanding, Utah.

Why would a town change its name? Blanding was originally named Grayson after pioneer Nellie Grayson Lyman.

Then a businessman named Thomas W. Bicknell made Grayson citizens an offer they couldn’t refuse. In 1914, Bicknell offered any town in Utah a 1,000-book library to change their name to his. But if Bicknell gave them the books, why did Grayson change its name to Blanding? Two towns answered his request, and Bicknell, Utah, another town 181 miles northwest of Blanding, tied for the honor. So each town got five hundred books. Blanding was named for Bicknell’s wife’s maiden name, Amelia Blanding.

Mormons Walter C. Lyman and Joseph Lyman and their families founded Blanding in 1897. Ancestral Puebloans lived in the area on White Mesa near Blue Mountain as early as 600 CE because of local springs and pools. Later the Utes, Navajos, and Spaniards also frequented the area because of its water supply. Today the economy hinges on mineral processing, agriculture, tourism, and transportation.

Blanding is the gateway to many natural and archaeological sites in southeastern Utah. In addition to those mentioned earlier in this book, it is on the edge of Cedar Mesa archaeological and wilderness area. That mesa reaches ninety miles from the southern Utah border to Capitol Reef National Park and covers nearly four hundred square miles (1,036 sq km) of land.

On the northwest edge of Blanding, Utah, Edge of the Cedars State Park Museum has to be the most accessible Ancestral Pueblo ruins anywhere in the Four Corners region. It’s less than a mile and a half (2.42 km) from the center of town, and you could walk to it from most of the town’s lodging places. In addition to the partially restored dwelling site inhabited from 700 to 1220 CE, the park has an archaeological site, museum, and research center, and it serves as a regional archaeological repository.

If you start at Bluff (elevation 4,324 feet/1,318 m) and go up twenty-five miles north on U.S. Highway 191, you’ll reach Blanding (elevation 6,106 feet/1,861 m). If you keep climbing another thousand feet in the next twenty miles north, you will reach the town of Monticello, Utah (elevation 7,070 feet/2,154 m). The towns are close enough that you might call them three sisters. If you happen to have three sisters as this author does, you know that while they are often close, they can also be very different. Monticello is the sister who stands out among the three. Rather than sitting on a flat mesa, the town rests at the base of the Abajo Mountains. Known locally as the Blue Mountains, they are a small range west of town in the Manti-La Sal National Forest. Often snow-capped Abajo Peak looms over Monticello at 11,360 feet (3,463 m).

MOAB, UTAH Fifty miles north of Monticello is Moab, the center of the largest number of tourist attractions in the Four Corners. The Colorado River bends around Moab, so it is about a mile to the north of the town and also a mile and a half to its west. With Canyonlands National Park and Dead Horse Point State Park to its west and Arches National Park to the north, Moab serves as a base camp for boating, kayaking, mountain biking, and rafting. A city full of attractions and accommodations, Moab is the closest to the most fantastic arches, spires, and canyons.

Mormons named their settlement Moab, the Biblical land beyond the Jordan River. Spanish explorer Juan de Rivera found this to be a good crossing place in 1765, but it was sixty-five years later before Europeans returned, when Mexican soldiers blazed a trail between Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Los Angeles, California. Pathfinder John C. Fremont dubbed it “The Old Spanish Trail.” When connected with the Santa Fe Trail, it created the final arduous link for the first transcontinental route from America’s east coast to its west coast.

Uranium mining was big business in the area in the 1950s, but today the intersections are jammed with tour vans, boats on trailers, and four-wheeled vehicles with mountain bikes strapped to their roofs.

The Titan, an astounding 900-feet-tall (274 meters) sandstone spire is part of Fisher Towers near Moab.

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CANYONLANDS NATIONAL PARK “The most weird, wonderful, magical place on earth— there is nothing else like it anywhere.”

—edward abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast, 2006.

If southern Utah were a three-ring circus, Canyonlands National Park would be in the center ring under the big top with Arches National Park and Deadhorse State Park as the sideshows. In Canyonlands, the Green River and the Colorado River join to form the largest river in the West. The two great rivers cut deep rugged canyons into the park’s 340,000 acres (1,375 sq km) full of massive sandstone arches, mesas, and spires.

The park is divided into four distinct districts: the Needles, the Maze, the Island in the Sky, and the two rivers themselves.

Island in the Sky is situated on top of sandstone cliffs 2,000 feet (600 m) above the rivers just upstream from where they join. There is a paved road along the top of the promontory with several pullouts that provide excellent bird’s-eye views of Canyonlands’ rivers and canyons.

Not only are there fantastic views but Canyonlands is also a popular destination for hikers, mountain bikers, backpackers, four-wheelers, and kayakers. For more than ten years, an average of 400,000 visitors reach Canyonlands per year, and in 2016 that number increased to 776,218 visitors who came to experience one of the most impressive sections of the Colorado Plateau.

Canyonland National Park’s Great Gallery in Horseshoe Canyon features some of the most significant rock art in North America.

The images date from 2000 B.C.E. to as recent as 1300 C.E. TOP: It is not clear who built this stone circle in Canyonlands National Park or whether it was used as a kiva-style ceremonial structure.

OVERLEAF: Sunrise at Mesa Arch, Canyonlands National Park.

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NEWSPAPER ROCK STATE HISTORIC MONUMENT This state monument has just one feature: a 200-square-foot Wingate sandstone rock covered so thickly with hundreds of ancient Indian petroglyphs (rock carvings) that it reminds one of a newspaper. The pictures were pecked into the dark “desert varnish,” the brown, black, or maroon-tinged manganese deposits coating the sandstone and caused by rain and bacteria.

This rock is one of the best-preserved and largest collections of rock carvings in the Southwest, featuring a wide variety of human, animal, and abstract forms.

The Navajo call it Tsé Hone (a rock that tells a story) and archaeologists believe that the first pictures were carved more than two thousand years ago. Rock art is also visible on nearby cliffs, but Newspaper Rock is the main attraction.

Newspaper Rock features more petroglyphs per square inch than any other location.

DEAD HORSE POINT STATE PARK Along with Horseshoe Bend and the Goosenecks, Dead Horse Point is one of the most photogenic gooseneck incised meanders on the Colorado Plateau. Looming 2,000 feet above the Colorado River, these steep cliffs carved by wind and water furnish a most phenomenal view that is difficult to portray with photographs, let alone words. The scale and scope have to be experienced in person to get the full impact.

ARCHES NATIONAL PARK This 119-square-mile (310 sq km) national park has more than 2,000 arches in various blends of red, orange, and pink sandstone, making it the highest density of arches anywhere in the world.

Arches differ from natural bridges in the way that nature creates them. Natural bridges occur only where floodwaters run strong and fast in deep channels, while arches are formed by gravity, wind, and rain removing sandstone particles gradually to achieve the same “holing-through” effect. While arches can develop in many kinds of rock, sandstone’s combination of being strong enough to support tall cliffs and yet soft and porous enough to erode easily make it a prime material for arch formation.

New arches are still being formed, and old ones collapse.

Delicate Arch is the star of the show, but Balanced Rock, Double Arch, Frame Arch, and Landscape Arch are also photographers’ favorites. Delicate Arch is 65 feet (20 m) tall and is considered the most impressive formation in the park.

When the Winter Olympic Games were held in Salt Lake City

KOKOPELLI

Kokopelli petroglyphs, Puerco Pueblo, Petrified Forest, Arizona.

Of all the ancient figures pecked and painted onto the sandstone cliffs and pottery throughout the Southwest, Kokopelli is the leading celebrity. His simple stick figure drawn in profile began to appear around 1000 CE in the Four Corners area and spread through all parts of each of the four states over four centuries. Fewer and fewer images appeared after that, and by the time the Spaniards arrived in the mid-1500s, there were no more new images of Kokopelli.

Depending on the area and the legend, Kokopelli was a hunter, minstrel, trader, storyteller, trickster, a seducer of maidens, or any combination of those traits. The Hopi katsina Kokopölö is portrayed with a hump and brings rain, good crops, and human fertility. The Zuni katsina Paiyatemu, the flute-playing cicada, plays to bring the rainy season. Regional Native American artists still use his figure for baskets, silverwork, textiles, and other art forms.

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Sunset at Dead Horse Point State Park. BELOW: North Window Arch frames Turret Arch, Arches National Park.

OVERLEAF: Balanced Rock is one of Arches National Park’s major attractions.

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SILVERTON AND DURANGO, COLORADO Silverton, Colorado, has a billboard on the edge of town in old-time lettering that says, “Welcome to Silverton, a Victorian Mining Town.” It was founded in 1874 after prospectors found a rich silver vein in the San Juan Mountains. They found gold in 1882 and the mines continued to close and reopen through floods and even the 1929 stock market crash, continuing operations as recently as 2015.

Nestled at an elevation of 9,318 feet (2,836 m) above sea level and flanked by the San Juan and Rio Grande National Forests, the 1.86 million-acre (7,530 sq km) region includes the San Luis Valley, the world’s largest agricultural alpine valley. In addition to harvesting lettuce and potatoes, they are the main barley supplier for the Coors Brewing Company.

Silverton is a Rocky Mountain/Continental Divide town unlike Utah’s Colorado Plateau towns sitting atop hot dry sandstone mesas. The Continental Divide runs atop a series of mountain crests from Canada to Central America. When rain and snow hit these high peaks, water either runs down their western slopes to the Pacific Ocean or their eastern slopes to the Atlantic Ocean. The Continental Divide zigzags roughly ten miles east of Silverton and then ten miles south of it.

Most people have probably never heard of this small alpine town before and those who do know it are likely fans of the Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad. The Denver & Rio Grande Railway founded the town of Durango, Colorado, in 1880 and their train began hauling passengers and freight from Durango to Silverton by 1882. Constructed primarily to haul gold and silver ore out of the San Juan Mountains, it is estimated that at least three hundred million dollars in valuable metals have been carried on this train.

The famous narrow gauge track out of Silverton was completed in 1887. The train suffered many challenges, from floods to economic downturns to the 1918 Spanish Influenza Pandemic, but continued to operate. In 1947 the owners threatened to shut it down for lack of profits, but the staff persevered, promoted tourism, and kept the line alive. Hollywood saved the day by filming at least five major motion pictures

Constructed in 1908, the San Juan County Courthouse (left) is part of a federally designated National Historic Landmark District. LEFT: The Durango & Silverton Railway locomotive leaving Silverton, Colorado. OPPOSITE: Ice Lake, Fuller Peak, Vermilion Peak, and Golden Horn near Silverton, Colorado. OVERLEAF: need caption. OVERLEAF: A gondola near Telluride, Colorado, provides a completely different perspective of the Four Corners area.

that showcased the train: Across the Wide Missouri, Around the World in 80 Days, Denver & Rio Grande, Ticket to Tomahawk, and Viva Zapata! all premiered in the 1950s, and the train became famous all over again with the epic blockbuster western Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in 1969. The Durango & Silverton continues with year-round train service using 100 percent coal-burning steam engines.

Fifty miles south of Silverton and three thousand feet downhill, Durango, Colorado, sits on the banks of the Animas River in the San Juan Mountains. Founded by railroad administrators and named after Durango, Mexico, its abundant water and favorable terrain and climate made it a stopping point on the Old Spanish Trail in the eighteenth century. Going back even farther to the first people to arrive in North America, the Clovis Culture hunters lived there as early as 12,000 BCE. Durango is a popular fly-fishing site and a favorite spot for kayaking, hiking, and rock climbing. The railroad is one of its major attractions, but it is also the gateway to Mesa Verde National Park.

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MESA VERDE NATIONAL PARK

In Mesa Verde National Park, forty miles east of Durango, Colorado, you will encounter the most exceptional prehistoric cliff dwelling sites, more than five thousand in all. This 50,000acre park (202 sq km) includes six hundred cliff dwellings, and receives more than half a million visitors per year. Because of its exceptional archaeological presence, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) declared Mesa Verde National Park a World Heritage Site in 1978.

Mesa Verde means “green table” in Spanish and is so named because it sits on top of a verdant mesa at 8,500 feet (2,590 m) above sea level. The Ancestral Puebloans built pit houses here around 550 CE because there were natural springs in the area and water runoff at the bottom of the cliffs. Like the Hopi mesas, there is almost no water on top of the mesa.

For the next five hundred years they built underground ceremonial kivas and multistoried apartment structures known as pueblos. After 1200 CE they moved from the top of the mesa and into the large alcoves under the sandstone cliff overhangs.

Some Mesa Verde cliff dwellings seem to defy gravity and others blend perfectly with their surroundings. While most had fewer than ten rooms, Cliff Palace had more than 150 rooms and 20 kivas. Drought and other circumstances caused the Ancestral Puebloans to vacate the area around 1300 CE. Their descendants probably migrated south and southwest to the Rio Grande area around Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and Taos, as well as the Hopi mesas in Arizona.

The area is in such a remote and formidable location that no one reached the ruins until Richard Wetherill and his brother-in-law Charles Mason stumbled onto them in 1888 while looking for stray cattle. Richard was the brother of John Wetherill, Monument Valley trading post owner. Richard had been searching for ruins in southwest Colorado when a Ute Indian named Acowitz supposedly told him of a canyon where there were many Ancient Ones’ houses.

Ancestral Puebloans built with wood beams and sandstone blocks.

The blocks were cemented together with mortar made of soil, water, and ash. LEFT: Since bowls like this one from Mesa Verde National Park were rarely blackened by fire, archaeologists deduce that they were used for mixing or serving food and not cooking it.

TOP: One of the larger dwellings at Mesa Verde National Park, Cliff Palace was inhabited from 1190 C.E. to 1300 C.E. It has 23 kivas and 150 rooms.

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CORTEZ AND DOLORES, COLORADO — CENTER OF THE ANCIENT WORLD

CANYONS OF THE ANCIENTS NATIONAL MONUMENT While the ruins at Canyons of the Ancients are not as impressive architecturally as those at Mesa Verde, they far surpass it in number of sites. This 176,000-acre monument (712 sq km) has the highest density of archaeological sites in the United States.

The total number of archaeological sites, including those not fully recorded, is estimated at 30,000.

The earliest sites at this location date from the Developmental Pueblo period, 750 to 1100 BCE, and habitation ends during the Great Pueblo period, 1100 to 1300 CE. While almost all other Ancient Pueblo dwellers left their large communities around 1350 CE, those at Canyons of the Ancients left their homelands almost two centuries earlier. Some moved to Chaco Canyon or Mesa Verde, while others migrated south to New Mexico and Arizona and are the ancestors of the modern Zunis and Hopis. Canyon of the Ancients is bordered by canyons on its northern and eastern boundaries, and it surrounds Hovenweep National Monument on its western boundary at the Colorado/Utah border.

If Durango is the gateway to Mesa Verde, then the neighboring towns of Delores and Cortez are the archaeology epicenter for the Four Corners and the entire Southwest. Cortez is just twenty miles west of Mesa Verde National Park and Dolores is ten miles north of Cortez.

Delores is the home of the Anasazi Heritage Center, a museum that interprets hunter-gatherer and Ancestral Pueblo cultures. There are two twelfth-century archaeological sites on the grounds, named after the Spanish priest explorers, Escalante and Dominguez. Some of the three million artifacts discovered in the area are on permanent display at the museum, and it is also the visitor center for Canyons of the Ancients National Park, about ten miles west of Cortez.

Also within fifty miles of Cortez are Hovenweep National Monument, the Ute Mountain Tribal Park, Crow Canyon Archaeological Center, Yucca House National Monument, and Canyons of the Ancients National Monument. And Cortez is the closest town to the Four Corners National Monument just thirty-four miles way.

Ancestral Puebloan tower at Canyons of the Ancients National Monument near Cortez, Colorado. LEFT: A Lakota Sioux dances the Grass Dance at the Cortez Cultural Center, an example of pantribal powwow participants. TOP: Lowry Pueblo, Canyons of the Ancients National Monument, Colorado.

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SHIPROCK: THE ROCK Ten miles southwest of the town of Shiprock and rising 1,583 feet (482.5 m) above the surrounding plain, looms the volcanic plug known as Shiprock, called the Winged Rock by the Navajos. It also fits the geological definition of a monadnock or inselberg—an isolated knob, ridge, rock hill, or small mountain that rises abruptly from a flat plain or gentle slope.

It plays an important part in Navajo spiritual traditions. Like Church Rock and Agathla Peak, this mass of lava was level with the plain when the magma rose up to ground level but did not erupt and form a volcano. As the surrounding swamps and seas receded, the Colorado Plateau turned to desert and eroded, leaving Shiprock standing alone. The Navajos say that Monster Slayer and He Who Cuts Life Out of the Enemy vanquished a man-eating eagle here. The sharp pinnacles on top are feathers pointing to the sky.

NAVAJO LAND, NAVAJO WATER The Treaty of 1868 that allowed the Navajo people to return to their homeland from the Bosque Redondo also provided for farmland and agricultural assistance, but no action was taken to put the stipulations into practice. Four decades later in 1908 the United States Supreme Court then ruled on an Indian reservation water rights case, Winters v. United States. The Court then created the Winters Doctrine to define American Indian water rights. This case set a precedent for all Indian reservation water rights and continues to do so today.

After almost a century since the Treaty of 1868, the United States Congress passed Public Law 87-483 in 1962 to provide water for farmland in New Mexico’s San Juan River basin.

It called for the preparation of 110,630 acres and the diversion of 508,000 acre-feet from the Navajo Reservoir. Finally, in 1972, when the irrigation systems were built and ready to deliver water to the land, the Navajo Nation Council developed the Navajo Agricultural Products Industry (NAPI) to create employment for tribal members and to operate a profitable agribusiness. With 72,000 acres of fields in production, NAPI is now one of the largest contiguous farmland areas in the United States and ships its products all over the world. Alfalfa, corn, barley, oats, potatoes, and beans are their high-quality crops grown under the Navajo Pride brand.

barrels and 4.5 million cubic feet of natural gas production.

Along with uranium, these products have been a major factor in the Navajo economy for almost a century.

CROWNPOINT, NEW MEXICO Eighty-three miles south of Farmington you’ll find Crownpoint, a town of 2,630 people on the Navajo Reservation, founded as an Indian Agency in 1912. It has a high school, a health-care facility, Navajo Technical University, a branch of Diné College, a grocery store, a convenience store, and a gas station.

But it also has Crownpoint Elementary School, which has made Crownpoint famous with rug collectors from all over the world, because of their Navajo rug auction. Hundreds of the finest hand-woven rugs are sold from fifty to thousands of dollars. The weavers themselves display and sell their rugs, and the sale of just one rug can sometimes help sustain a family for a year. The auction is almost always on the second Friday of the month. Viewing starts around 4:30 and the auction starts at 7:00. It’s always best to check first by visiting www.crownpointrugauction.com or calling (505) 786-5302 or (505) 786-7386.

TRAIL OF THE ANCIENTS— NEW MEXICO BRANCH In New Mexico, a second network of roads leading to archaeological and geological landmarks is included under the same name as the group of Utah roads mentioned previously. In New Mexico however, the list of landmarks includes contemporary Native American cultural sites.

Starting at the end and working backward, Farmington is at the northernmost part of the trail. From there we go southwest almost into Arizona to the Toadlena Post Office and Two Grey Hills Trading Post, then down Highway 491 along the Arizona/

NAVAJO MINING In addition to farming and raising livestock, mining plays a large part in the Navajo Nation’s economy. The Four Corners contains huge reserves of coal, natural gas, oil, and uranium.

It’s estimated that two major American coal companies, Peabody, and Pittsburgh and Midway, extract more than 23 tons of coal per year there. In 1991 oil wells produced 6.1 million

Wild horses still thrive on the Navajo Reservation. OPPOSITE: Twenty-eight miles west of Farmington, New Mexico, and just 25 miles southeast of the Four Corners monument, the volcanic plug named Shiprock towers 1,583 feet (482 meters) above the Colorado Plateau.

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Route 66 became their magical yellow brick road, taking the fastest diagonal route from the Midwest to Hollywood. Once again, geography favored the Colorado Plateau; its ancient ocean beds offered a flat route south of the Rocky Mountains.

Route 66 enters New Mexico from Oklahoma and roughly follows the 35th parallel north and the Santa Fe Railway route horizontally across the Colorado Plateau, passing through Albuquerque, Laguna Pueblo, Grants, and Gallup, and maintains a straight line along what is now Interstate 40 through Holbrook, Winslow, and Flagstaff.

Route 66 was replaced by interstate freeways by 1985, but the song and syndicated TV series Route 66, turned this transcontinental highway into an American icon.

THE ÁCOMA AN D THEIR SKY CITY

The legend grew for the same reason other American legends did: publicity and marketing. Like the Harvey Company and Santa Fe Railway that preceded it, Route 66 became a major distribution network for Native American arts and crafts.

According to Margaret Moore Booker in Southwest Art Defined: An Illustrated Guide, quite a few trading posts on Route 66 stopped carrying high-quality native-made goods and just sold cheap mass-produced items. However, several towns along Route 66 through the Four Corners, like Gallup, Holbrook, and Winslow, continue to sell fine native-made art sold in quality trading posts and galleries.

High atop a steep-walled 367-foot sandstone mesa, Ácoma Pueblo rests almost as it did in 1150 CE when it was built, and may be the oldest continuously inhabited community in the United States. The Ácoma people are a federally recognized tribe related to the Keres and connected with Hopi and Zia pueblos. Ácoma elders say that their name is known as Akome, Acu, Acuo, or Ako and it means “place that always was.” Ácomas were probably part of the Mesa Verde migrations of the middle thirteenth century. In addition to Old Ácoma on top of the mesa, there was Casa Blanca, now a Laguna village, and other villages as far as sixty miles away.

The pueblo covers 431,644 acres, and there are 250 dwellings and more than 4,800 members of the tribe. In 1629, Friar Juan Ramirez directed construction of the massive-walled San Estevan del Rey Mission Church on top of the mesa.

In his book Ácoma: Pueblo in the Sky, Ward Alan Minge wrote that one of the oldest stories the people of Ácoma tell is about their ancestors coming from a place underground called Shipapu. The first to come from there were sisters, Nautsiti and Iatiku. Everything else came alive when they arrived at Ácoma.

This image of roof ladders at Acoma Pueblo looks like a painting by one of the Taos Society of Artists, who presented new images of the Southwest’s ancient beauty to the eyes of the modern world.

TOP: Begun in 1926 and completed in 1938, Route 66 paved the way for the booming automobile tourism business, including the Santo Domingo trading post at Kewa Pueblo (formerly known as Santo Domingo).

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FRE D HARVEY: HIS COMPANY AN D HIS GIRLS

Photo courtesy of the Old Trails Museum/Winslow Historical Society

Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway Company/Wikimedia

Before all the artists and writers and moviemakers, a young English immigrant created iconic images of the Southwest so strong and crisp that even today these romantic motifs live on in millions of people’s imaginations. He made the Grand Canyon, the Hopi Mesas, and the New Mexico Pueblos popular attractions and changed the worldview of the American West from a harsh wasteland to an idyllic wonderland of panoramic views and spiritual people living at one with nature. In less than twenty years, Fred Harvey transformed the American West from a country to be survived and gotten through to a “Land of Enchantment” to be traveled to and enjoyed.

Fredrick Henry Harvey emigrated from Liverpool, England, in 1853, and after moving up the ladder from potscrubber to busboy to waiter to line cook in no time, he moved to New Orleans and then to St. Louis and by age twenty-one he was a successful restaurateur.

After losing everything in the Civil War, Fred went to work for the Chicago, Baltimore & Quincy Railroad and worked his way up from baggage clerk to freight agent.

In 1875 he opened two cafes along the Kansas Pacific Railway but they closed that same year. However, Harvey knew that trackside service was terrible and that the food was barely edible. The Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway gave him a contract to give it a try, and the first hotel and eating house opened in Florence, Kansas, in 1878. The plan was so successful that in

less than twenty years there were more than a dozen hotels and cafes along the track from Kansas to California.

Fred formed his own Harvey Company but it was so intertwined with the Santa Fe that it was hard to tell which was which. Through a massive image-building publicity campaign using every print media from books to calendars and even matchbooks, the two companies promoted the virtues of the “Indian Southwest” as a perfect vacation destination. Harvey added gift shops in the hotel or next to the depots where excellent Indian craftsmen demonstrated their skills and you could buy the artwork they created. He created the “Indian Department” in the early 1900s that commissioned artists and photographers to convey the beauty of the Native American Southwest.

He also created the Harvey Girls, a Southwestern phenomenon that opened the doors to economic freedom, independence, and adventure for America’s single women. The story goes that after a team of waiters got into a drunken brawl in Raton, New Mexico, and couldn’t work the next day, Harvey fired them all and replaced them with young women. It probably didn’t happen quite that fast, but according to Jesse Rhodes’ article, “How the West Was Won . . . by Waitresses” on Smithsonian.com, Harvey began placing ads calling for “intelligent girls of strong character between the ages of 18 and 30.”

The usual uniform was a long black dress with its hem no higher than eight inches above the floor, black opaque stockings, black shoes, and white starched apron. They worked twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week. The Harvey Girls were required to live in dormitories with matrons to enforce a 10:30 p.m. curfew. Their contracts also stipulated that they could not get married for one year or forfeit a portion of their base pay.

Some say this was the most broken promise in the West.

Everyone knew the Harvey Girls in the 1880s, but by the 1930s their fame faded, as tourists turned their attention to roadhouses and diners on Route 66. But when the MGM musical The Harvey Girls came out in 1947 and Judy Garland sang the Oscar-winning song “The Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe” from a railroad car’s back platform, moviegoers fell in love with the independent “can-do” Harvey Girls for decades to come. The Harvey family sold the company to Amfac Parks & Resorts in 1968, which was renamed Xanterra Parks & Resorts in 2002.

The new tourism trends offered new opportunities for economic independence for the intrepid Harvey Girls. TOP: Western tourism expanded dramatically as Innovative entrepreneur Fred Harvey made the journey more palatable.

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6. The Tail of the Spiral: Back in Arizona WINDOW ROCK Apropos of the famous Four Corners landscape, the Navajo Nation’s capital is named after a red sandstone arch, which are often called windows. The Navajos call this location Tségháhoodzání, which means “the rock-with-hole-through-it” or “perforated rock” and the arch has spiritual significance to them. Window Rock is the tribal government headquarters and the home of several U.S. government agencies.

There are several attractions worth visiting in Window Rock, including the Navajo Nation Museum, Navajo Nation Zoo and Botanical Park, and the Memorial Park. Established in 1961, the first Navajo Tribal Museum then moved to the Navajo Arts and Crafts Enterprise back room in 1982, and finally the magnificent seven-million-dollar Navajo Nation Museum and Library opened in 1997. Its extensive archaeological, ethnographic, and art holdings include more than 40,000 photographs, documents, recordings, films, and videos. The focus is on Navajo artists, including weavers, along with historical and cultural exhibits.

Just four hundred feet northeast of the museum’s front entrance you will find another treat, the Navajo Nation Zoo and Botanical Park. Founded in 1963 when it housed bears, coyotes, snakes, elk, and even a golden eagle, the park now

offers a much wider variety of animals, birds, fishes, insects, and plants native to the Four Corners area, including Mexican gray wolves, cougars, bighorn sheep, lynx, and Rio Grande wild turkeys.

Window Rock is also the home of Tony Hillerman’s fictional detective, Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn, and the host city for the Professional Rodeo Cowboys’ Association Rodeo, the Navajo Nation Fair, and the Navajo Nation Treaty Day celebration.

WINDOW ROCK NAVAJO TRIBAL PARK AN D VETERANS MEMORIAL The Window Rock Navajo Tribal Park and Veterans Memorial sits amid tribal government offices. The centerpiece of the park is a bronze statue of a Code Talker kneeling with his field radio placed with an excellent view of the sandstone window in the background.

The memorial, built by Navajo people, honors all Navajos who served in the United States armed services. The design came from a combination of Native Vietnam War veterans, Navajo Code Talkers, and Navajo medicine men.

The park forms a traditional medicine wheel surrounded by a circular path and incorporates many symbolic elements, including the four cardinal directions, the four sacred colors, the circle of life, and an eternal fire in the center. There are sixteen tall, angled, steel pillars that represent bayonets and there is also a sanctuary for solitude, healing, and reflection.

The sandstone window rock arch that gave the town of Window Rock its name.

ABOVE: The Navajo Code Talker Memorial was designed and executed by famed Navajo/Ute sculptor Oreland Joe. The memorial was made possible through the Navajo Code Talkers Memorial Foundation, Inc., and was dedicated in 2004.

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On December 6, 1963, Navajo Annie Dodge Wauneka was one of thirty authors, diplomats, educators, musicians, and a former U.S. Supreme Court justice awarded the first Presidential Medal of Freedom, created by President John F. Kennedy that year. President Lyndon Johnson read, “First woman elected to the Navajo Tribal Council; by her long crusade for improved health programs, she has helped dramatically to lessen the menace of disease among her people and to improve their way of life.”

Annie Dodge was born in Deer Springs, Arizona, in 1910. At age eight she survived a mild attack of Spanish Influenza, saw many Navajos die of the disease, and helped the overworked nurse at the Fort Defiance school care for those struck by the pandemic. She was called on again when trachoma became widespread at her school.

Later she said, “From my childhood I have been aware of the problems of my tribe and have wanted to help make our people aware of them.”

Her father was Henry Chee Dodge, a prestigious Navajo Nation leader, rancher, trading post owner, and chairman of the Navajo Tribal Council from 1941 until his death in 1947 at age ninety. Wauneka left school in the eleventh grade to help her father and political mentor with his duties as head of the Tribal Council. She often accompanied her father on his visits to needy families, reinforcing her awareness of the Navajo Nation’s dire need for modern health care.

In 1951, Wauneka became the first woman to be elected to the Council, defeating two other candidates, one of whom was her husband, George L. Wauneka. They met at an Indian boarding school at Fort Defiance and were married in a traditional Navajo ceremony in 1929. He was a rancher like her father, and they lived near Sawmill for a few years and then moved to Tanner Springs, both in northwestern Arizona. The couple had eight children, two of whom died at an early age.

In her decades-long leadership career, Wauneka traveled to villages and clinics all over the Navajo Reservation as a champion of public health, and urged people to move to modern dwellings and improve the reservation’s water quality. Frustrated by the objections of tribal medicine makers, she convinced numerous tribal members to adopt a mixture of modern medicine and traditional ways. And she led the way in wiping out tuberculosis among the Navajos in the 1950s.

Wikimedia

ANNIE DODGE WAUNEKA

Wauneka served as chairwoman of the health committee on the Navajo Tribal Council for almost three decades. She first went to Washington, D.C., with representatives of an advisory council in 1952, and over the years became a vocal presence before the Bureau of Indian Affairs, always wearing traditional Navajo dress and jewelry.

She attended the University of Arizona in the mid-1950s and earned a Bachelor of Science degree in public health. She received an honorary doctorate in public health from the University of Arizona in 1976, and an honorary Doctor of Laws degree in 1996.

Wauneka served on the advisory boards of the U.S. Surgeon General and the U.S. Public Health Service. Ladies’ Home Journal declared her Woman of the Year in 1976, and the Navajo Tribal Council named her “Our Legendary Mother” in 1984.

Annie Dodge Wauneka continued to advise the Navajo Tribal Council into her eighties and died in November 1997 in Klagetoh, Arizona, at age 87. Navajo Tribal President Albert Hale, another of Annie Dodge Wauneka’s grandsons, said, “She made us proud to be Navajo.”

ABOVE RIGHT: Annie Dodge Wauneka (1910–1977), nationally known Navajo health-care advocate and first woman elected to the Navajo Nation Tribal Council. ABOVE LEFT: Henry Chee Dodge (1860-1947), Navajo Nation leader.

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“Destined to become a classic.” — 

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WAY OUT ON THE COLORA DO PLATEAU, TWO LINES CRISSCROSS WHERE THE BORDERS OF FOUR STATES MEET.

If you stand on this spot, you’ll be in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah all at the same time. And within 150 miles of that point, in every direction, you’ll find a rugged land of astonishing beauty, fantastic rock formations, ancient cities, and diverse cultures.

New York Times best-selling author Anne Hillerman calls this “a beautiful and important book, packed to the brim with historical insights, useful tidbits for travelers, and, best of all, a profound appreciation for this unique part of America’s West. The stunning photographs dramatically reflect the majesty and mystery of this unusual landscape and the resilient people who call it home.

This is a volume to savor from your armchair or to inspire a trip to see these places firsthand.”

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